What's Happened?
by Blackbirdwrite
Summary: As Miss Walker's tether to reality begins to shred and she insists she must marry the Reverand Ainsworth to quiet the voices inside her head Anne Lister goes in search of a horsewhip meant for Ainsworth.


**What's Happened?  
**

Nearby the Priestley's House —

With a sharp crack, my walking stick meets the ground as I leave the ashen clergyman, Thomas Ainsworth behind. Perhaps, he is more reverent on the days he is not a blackmailer. I could not say. But he should fear me because he has made me livid.

What else is there to call his molestation of Miss Walker but rape? And does it not fall to me, as the gentlemanly woman courting her, to punish her rapist? Let him believe he has escaped me. He doesn't know I've been in want of a strong horsewhip in my hand ever since driving in the team on the Highflyer.

I suspect at around four o'clock the carriage carrying Mr. Ainsworth will travel down the Leeds Road. There's a small cave under the tree roots. I know exactly where to set up.

Three hours later —

Love and sex have so many mysteries. I am no fool, ask anyone, and yet I believe each time something will be different and that it'll break my way for a change. I am always wrong. How is it possible that I can calculate everything else but this?

I am a walking library of erotic poetry, so much so that I have my blushing down on cue. I can recite every romantic downfall in Shakespeare, and yet, somehow I foolishly believe, over and over again, that I will escape the fated reckoning of heartbreak.

Yesterday, she was the sweetest lover I'd ever had. Today, I'm grateful, dare I say it and speak it out loud, to escape the madness that has overtaken her.

What's happened? I find myself asking this question all too often when I see her crumpled and crying or in some other fit of near hysteria. She can have all my strength. I'll surround her with it. But what's to be done about the disturbance inside her mind?

Quite suddenly we are on treacherous ground. Today, something rather big between us broke, and I'm no longer sure I can save this good thing that's been happening between us.

I've questioned myself over and over in my diaries. Where did I go wrong that time, or the time before that, or that other time, or with her, or her? It's madness for me to keep looking for a pattern because the one I do see is all too immense for me to ever hope for a clear sail through it.

My whole adult life has been spent trying and failing to convince eligible ladies, who'd otherwise be marrying men, instead to marry me.

I've not had the luck I'd wished for, and yet, throughout all my scrapes with women, I have evolved. I've gotten smoother. I know how to arouse them in ways they never see coming./p

But the loop still repeats regardless of my refinements, calculations, and choices./p

I'm in love as the courtship begins and the boundaries between us are redrawn. Romance is everywhere when we're together. Every touch leads to a kiss and then to more until her resistance is gone and she's mine.

But it always ends the same. My love is lost; pain begins and spreads everywhere. Misery overtakes me in a perpetual winter.

I'm almost to the entrance of the tunnel, where I'll ready my surveillance for Ainsworth's carriage when out charges a fierce-looking thug who strikes me hard against my cheek and down on my shoulder with his stick. Some part of me cracks still I manage to throw his weapon out of reach. He reacts with a punishing blow to my face. Immediately, my mouth fills with blood, and I stagger every time he strikes me.

All I can hope for is to duck and avoid his fists and try to land a few good ones of my own, but I never suspected he'd hurl spit at me, warn me off Miss Walker, and then, suddenly leave.

Dazed and injured, I spew out a stream of metallic-tasting blood. I cannot live with myself if I don't do it. I check my pocket watch, and with my one good eye left, I see that it's 3:57. I can make it. I lift my hat off the ground. Ainsworth's carriage will pass by here near four. One brutally painful step at a time I make it through the mossy tunnel with a minute to spare.

Even if it kills me, even if it's the last thing I'll ever do in this life before I leave this beautiful earth with incredible growing things, like this thick green moss …when suddenly I see double and feel the right side of my face sliding down a slippery wall of green. Then a stream of vomit. This one is blood mixed with bile. I need to get home where it's safe, but I'm driven by her voice in my head that keeps repeating, "It's utterly clear to me now. It must be him …it's the Reverend Ainsworth I must marry."

I push off the wall and settle next to a tree to wait for his carriage. No one knows this yet, but I imagine word will get around how Miss Lister horsewhipped the Reverend Thomas Ainsworth on the Leeds Road just past four.

I smile at the thought and feel the pain where my lip's split. Well then, it may as well be — there's no one around to kiss anymore. All the same, Ainsworth's piece is coming off the chessboard every bit as hard as mine did when it fell earlier today.

I flip open my pocket watch and focus on it with my one good eye. I had checked my watch while still at Miss Walker's, before storming out, when I'd been with Miss Parkhill, who had been disagreeable and obstinate to all my attempts to agreeabalize with her and by 3:33 Miss Walker had said she'd rather die than anyone know what we "did with each other."

With the exception being, of course, that she'd wanted me inside her for hours these last nights and now I'm down to using my left —which I'm better at than I'd thought —but I walked straight into a tree last night after leaving her bed.

Who can keep their head on straight when your lover's orgasms start rippling up your arm? I couldn't. Can't. And now she's done with me?

That was head-spinning fast.

I adjust my top hat and look quizzically up at the sky as if flocks of blackbirds had the answers to my destructive streaks of romance. They don't and never will. We're alike in that way apparently. I hear the clip-clop of hooves before I spot the caramel-colored carriage bringing Mr. Ainsworth right to me. I loosen half a dozen granite stones about the size of cannonballs. They roll down the hill causing the horses coming at a trot to buck and shy and finally stop. My goal achieved.

The carriage driver pulls up his team when he sees me limping towards him. Wilkenson might be his name. I've seen him at the Stag's Head before; I'm fairly sure. His horsewhip is what I'm after.

I wince as I climb up onto the buckboard next to him. By this time, the footman has joined us, and from inside the carriage, Ainsworth is shouting, "Why've we stopped? Is everything all right?"

The carriage driver surveils my bloody face and rightly says, "You look hurt ma'am. We'll go straight away for the doctor."

"Wilkenson, is it?" I ask, hopefully, as a little blood drips out of my mouth. I dab it with my handkerchief as if it's nothing.

"Wilkenson, yes, ma'am." The carriage driver nods but looks even more concerned.

"Don't worry about this," I say as I wave my hand over my face and dab at my wounds with my handkerchief. "I'll take care of it all later but right now …." I open my hand to show the two men I'm holding four silver crowns in my palm. "I need a private moment with the man inside your carriage."

When neither man moves to stop me taking the horsewhip and climbing down by the carriage door, I drop the crowns into their hands. To the driver, I say, "Keep the team steady, will you? This one will start screaming soon."

I throw open the carriage door and grab Ainsworth by his episcopalian collar. It's then he begins to cry.

#Gentleman Jack #Anne Lister #Ann Walker


End file.
